“I’m going to brief you all on this mission, then our… guest will take over.”
My hand shot up, and my fingers fluttered in the air.
Winslade rolled his eyes. “Seriously, McGill? A question already? I haven’t even started yet.”
“Sir? Why are you doing the briefing instead of Turov?”
Winslade formed a tight little butthole with his mouth—at least, that’s what it looked like to me. “Because she’s not aboard. She stayed back at Central to organize the transmission of troops from Earth to this ship—and before you ask about Praetor Drusus, you should turn your brain on. He has no intention of wasting his time on this lengthy flight. He’ll join us when it suits him, probably when we’ve arrived in orbit over Green World.”
I thought that over for a good half-second, then I waved my hand around some more.
Winslade sighed loudly. His skinny hands moved up to rest on his hips. “What now, McGill?”
“Who’s our special guest?”
Winslade smirked, and he made a flourishing movement. It was the sort of thing a cute magician’s helper might do—but Winslade wasn’t cute.
We all looked toward the kitchen doors he was indicating. The doors swung open, and out walked the disgraced traitor, Maurice Armel.
The reaction was swift and universal. The crowd howled with hate and anger. People stood up and shook their fists. More than a few apples flew, striking him.
Armel stood proudly, weathering it all with his nose in the air.
Surprising me, I saw Leeza draw her pistol. She lifted it, but I knocked it down again, pinning her hand to the table.
“McGill! Let me kill him. You want to do it too, don’t you?”
“Uh… yeah. But I already did kill him once recently. I flogged his ass good, too. So it’s sort of out of my system.”
Leeza blinked at me in confusion. I understood the depths of her anger. She’d been Armel’s girlfriend for years. She’d even gone off and joined him in his most recent, most treacherous adventures. Eventually, she’d had enough of it, and she’d left him.
Coming back to Earth hadn’t been easy for her. She’d had to eat crap—about a mile of it. Somehow, after a good showing at Edge World, she’d been given a second chance. I thought that was strange… but I’d seen weirder things in my long and storied lifetime.
“Just hear him out,” I urged her.
Reluctantly, she sat back down beside me. I took the moment to examine her speculatively. She was an attractive woman, but not a raving beauty. I happened to know she had unusual habits in bed, and I couldn’t help thinking of such things now, while she scowled at Armel in a fury.
Armel proceeded to stand with Winslade and explain he had no official role with the expedition—that he was merely, as he put it “a guide” for Legion Varus.
That didn’t hold much water with the crowd. They wanted him drawn and quartered. I volunteered to do the honors, if it came to that. This sentiment scored me a mean smile from Leeza.
At last, Winslade got us to settle down and listen. Armel explained that the Skay ran a tight province out at 926, not like our loosey-goosy Mogwa masters. “In comparison,” Armel said, “the Mogwa are like bad pet owners that don’t even feed their animals or repair the garden fences.”
“Huh?” I asked aloud.
“I mean, McGill, that the Mogwa ignore us. They shirk their duties when it comes to protecting Earth, and give us no resources to work with. I served as the enforcer for the Skay in Province 926. They’re radically different. They’re both more effective and less arbitrary. Unfortunately, they’re also as heartless and off-handedly cruel as you might expect a race of planet-sized machines to be.”
“So… which is better?”
He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Probably the Mogwa. At least we can do what we want in this province—most of the time.”
“All right, all right,” Winslade interrupted. “Stop distracting him, McGill. Please, finish your briefing.”
“Of course, Sub-Tribune. Although I’m now only a private citizen—”
This was too much, so I had an outburst. “A private citizen? You’re a prisoner, not a citizen!”
Both Armel and Winslade gave me a sour glance, so I shut up.
“As I was saying,” Armel continued, “I don’t have any official business with the legions. But, I know things…”
He brought up a star map, and he showed where the border of Province 926 was. Essentially, it was the next chunk of space over, an area about a thousand lightyears wide and half that vertically. Our galaxy was only about five hundred lightyears thick in Earth’s neighborhood, despite being over a hundred thousand across. The shape of the whole thing was kind of like Saturn, with a fat round belly in the middle and rings of stars circling on the outside. That’s where we were, on the rim of the tire, so to speak.
He went on and on, going into more detail than I cared to listen to. He explained that the border had a line of automated sentry bots—asteroid-sized things.
“What? Are you kidding me? Are those baby-Skay I’m seeing?”
Armel looked at me for a moment, then back at the images he was playing with on the big screen. He nodded once. “Yes… they are sort of like that. But they’re not offspring. They are smaller, dumber AI beings. They lack both the firepower and the brainpower of their larger cousins. As a result, they’re not considered citizens. Think of them as guard-dogs.”
“Ha! Skay guard-dogs! All right.”
Armel went on, showing how we’d sneak past them, then fly for about a hundred lightyears, going deep
